Wisconsin Primary Elections: Live Coverage And Results

The final GOP delegate breakdown in Wisconsin looks almost certain to wind up at 36-6 or 39-3 for Cruz over Trump. But it all depends on what happens in the remaining precincts of the 3rd Congressional district, which takes in La Crosse and Eau Claire. Trump leads in most of the 3rd District’s counties, but Cruz leads in Eau Claire by 47 percent to 38 percent with only 18 of 84 precincts reporting. Fun side note: The first time I ever met Nate, he visited my Cook Report office in DC while he was conducting research for “The Signal and the Noise” in 2010. We spent the afternoon chatting about analyzing congressional districts, and I invited him to sit in on a candidate meeting with a Republican running for Wisconsin’s 3rd District to get a sense of how we size up congressional hopefuls. I introduced Nate to the candidate and his consultants as “our intern Nate” and hilariously, none of them had a clue who he really was. The candidate happened to own a minor league baseball team, the La Crosse Loggers. Towards the end of the discussion, Nate asked a few questions about the team’s up-and-coming player prospects. They still didn’t bat an eye – ha!! And, oh, the candidate, Dan Kapanke, lost.

Democrats award most of their delegates by congressional district in Wisconsin and in other states. Usually that doesn’t matter much because the share of delegates each candidate gets in a state winds up closely matching their statewide share of the vote anyway. Sometimes, however, a candidate gets lucky or unlucky because of rounding. Right now, Sanders looks to be getting a bit unlucky in Wisconsin. There are six delegates available in each of the 1st, 6th, 7th and 8th congressional districts. He leads Clinton in each one, but is splitting those delegates 3-3 with her in each case because his lead isn’t quite large enough for a 4-2 split. That could change as more votes are reported, of course.

A small little slice of the demographic in exit polls that might indicate just how strategic voters are getting as the race moves along: Cruz won voters with a postgraduate degree in Wisconsin, a group that Kasich has traditionally done very well with. Cruz got 54 percent of these voters in Wisconsin, while Kasich got only 18 percent. By contrast, in Michigan, another upper Midwestern state, Kasich won voters with postgraduate degrees, getting 37 percent of the vote, while Cruz only got 19 percent support.